scholarly journals 25 Years of Sustainability. A Critical Assessment

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandru-Ionuţ Petrişor ◽  
Liliana Petrişor

Abstract25 years have passed since the 'Brundtland Report‘ defined sustainability as a possibility to equally meet current and future needs. 15 years later, the author of the definition stated that despite of the fact that the definition does not need to be changed, its understanding bettered off during the interval. 25 years later, the present paper takes an in-depth look at the concept and its practical implications. One of the issues being addressed refers to the pillars of sustainability; their number increased by 25% to include the cultural pillar in addition to the economic, social, and cultural one. Spatial thinking added a new dimension, translating into concepts like 'sustainable communities‘ or 'self standing village‘ at the local level, and 'polycentricity‘ and 'cohesion‘ at the regional one. Furthermore, practical implications include environmental impact assessment (evolving towards strategic impact assessment), internalization of externalities, ecological restoration, and a new view on conservation, different from the one addressed by the 'Zero Growth Strategy‘. In addition, the paper discusses several criticism addressed to the concept and its implementation, attempting to reveal their underlying causes. Overall, the critical analysis shows that the attempts to achieve sustainability did not change the concept as much as its understanding.

Author(s):  
Nicolas Poirel ◽  
Claire Sara Krakowski ◽  
Sabrina Sayah ◽  
Arlette Pineau ◽  
Olivier Houdé ◽  
...  

The visual environment consists of global structures (e.g., a forest) made up of local parts (e.g., trees). When compound stimuli are presented (e.g., large global letters composed of arrangements of small local letters), the global unattended information slows responses to local targets. Using a negative priming paradigm, we investigated whether inhibition is required to process hierarchical stimuli when information at the local level is in conflict with the one at the global level. The results show that when local and global information is in conflict, global information must be inhibited to process local information, but that the reverse is not true. This finding has potential direct implications for brain models of visual recognition, by suggesting that when local information is conflicting with global information, inhibitory control reduces feedback activity from global information (e.g., inhibits the forest) which allows the visual system to process local information (e.g., to focus attention on a particular tree).


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Aniela Bălăcescu ◽  
Radu Șerban Zaharia

Abstract Tourist services represent a category of services in which the inseparability of production and consumption, the inability to be storable, the immateriality, and last but not least non-durability, induces in tourism management a number of peculiarities and difficulties. Under these circumstances the development of medium-term strategies involves long-term studies regarding on the one hand the developments and characteristics of the demand, and on the other hand the tourist potential analysis at regional and local level. Although in the past 20 years there has been tremendous growth of on-line booking made by household users, the tour operators agencies as well as those with sales activity continue to offer the specific services for a large number of tourists, that number, in the case of domestic tourism, increased by 1.6 times in case of the tour operators and by 4.44 times in case of the agencies with sales activity. At the same time, there have been changes in the preferences of tourists regarding their holiday destinations in Romania. Started on these considerations, paper based on a logistic model, examines the evolution of the probabilities and scores corresponding to the way the Romanian tourists spend their holidays on the types of tourism agencies, actions and tourist areas in Romania.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 29-31

Purpose Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings The problem with developing a reputation of being something of an oracle in the business world is that all of a sudden, everyone expects you to pull off the trick of interpreting the future on a daily basis. Like a freak show circus act or one-hit wonder pop singer, people expect you to perform when they see you, and they expect you to perform the thing that made you famous, even if it is the one thing in the world you don’t want to do. And when you fail to deliver on these heightened expectations, you are dismissed as a one trick pony, however good that trick is in the first place. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Šakić Trogrlić ◽  
Grant Wright ◽  
Melanie Duncan ◽  
Marc van den Homberg ◽  
Adebayo Adeloye ◽  
...  

People possess a creative set of strategies based on their local knowledge (LK) that allow them to stay in flood-prone areas. Stakeholders involved with local level flood risk management (FRM) often overlook and underutilise this LK. There is thus an increasing need for its identification, documentation and assessment. Based on qualitative research, this paper critically explores the notion of LK in Malawi. Data was collected through 15 focus group discussions, 36 interviews and field observation, and analysed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that local communities have a complex knowledge system that cuts across different stages of the FRM cycle and forms a component of community resilience. LK is not homogenous within a community, and is highly dependent on the social and political contexts. Access to LK is not equally available to everyone, conditioned by the access to resources and underlying causes of vulnerability that are outside communities’ influence. There are also limits to LK; it is impacted by exogenous processes (e.g., environmental degradation, climate change) that are changing the nature of flooding at local levels, rendering LK, which is based on historical observations, less relevant. It is dynamic and informally triangulated with scientific knowledge brought about by development partners. This paper offers valuable insights for FRM stakeholders as to how to consider LK in their approaches.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3670
Author(s):  
Suraj Lamichhane ◽  
Komal Raj Aryal ◽  
Rocky Talchabhadel ◽  
Bhesh Raj Thapa ◽  
Rabindra Adhikari ◽  
...  

The impacts of multihazards have become more pronounced over the past few decades globally. Multiple hazards and their cascading impacts claim enormous losses of lives, livelihoods, and built environment. This paradigm prompts integrated and multidisciplinary perspectives to identify, characterize, and assess the occurrence of multihazards and subsequently design countermeasures considering impending multihazard scenarios at the local level. To this end, we considered one of the most egregious transboundary watersheds, which is regarded as a multihazard hotspot of Nepal, to analyze the underlying causes and cascade scenarios of multihazards, and their associated impacts. In this paper, geophysical, hydrometeorological, and socioeconomic perspectives are formulated to characterize the watershed from the dimension of susceptibility to multihazard occurrence. To characterize the complex dynamics of transboundary multihazard occurrence, insights have been presented from both the Nepali and the Chinese sides. Individual case studies and the interrelation matrix between various natural hazards are also presented so as to depict multihazard consequences in the transboundary region. The sum of the observations highlights that the watershed is highly vulnerable to a single as well as multiple natural hazards that often switch to disasters.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kareen Nour ◽  
Sarah Dutilly-Simard ◽  
Astrid Brousselle ◽  
Pernelle Smits ◽  
Jean-Marie Buregeya ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Richard Calvi

Purpose According to Christopher (2000), in a lot of sectors, the competition is a question of supply chain against supply chain. The winner in term of competitive advantage should be the one, who is able to obtain more than the competitor from the available resources. In strategic literature, Dyer and Singh (1998) are the first who introduced the concept of “relational competency” to explain why some companies gain their competitive advantage not directly from their internal resources but mainly because they are able better to combine external resources. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study. Findings The author describes the different phases and strategic decisions in the building of a real supplier eco-system. Research limitations/implications It is a sole case study. Practical implications This study is a description of a success story. Originality/value This study is a description of an external resource management in action.


2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Alina Zajadacz ◽  
Aleksandra Minkwitz

AbstractThe purpose of the article is to present the concept of using social media (SM) as data sources and communication tools, useful at the various stages of planning, implementing and monitoring the effects of tourism development on a local level. The first part discusses the stages of planning, then presents the characteristics of SM, along with a discussion of the issues presented in the literature to this date. The next part presents data sources and methods of research on SM and functions that they can perform in tourism. The concept presented, on the one hand, reviews the perspectives of practical use of SM as a communication tool and source of data and, on the other hand, the challenges related to the need to further deepen research on tourism planning methods that are adequate to the continuously changing environment.


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